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He set the candle down on the table on which lay "The Kasidah" and a few other books, laid the letter beside it, with trembling hands drew up a chair and sat down. Rosamund had written to him. When? Before she had learnt the truth or afterwards? For a long time he sat there, leaning over the table, staring at the address which her hand had written. And he saw her hand, so different from Mrs.
So he drew from the pigeon-hole what he called his Lay, furbished up the few old verses, made a number of new ones, reconstructed the whole, and lo, The Kasidah! Burton calls it a translation of a poem by a certain Haji Abdu. There may have been a Haji Abdu who supplied thoughts, and even verses, but the production is really a collection of ideas gathered from all quarters.
I had three leading articles, over a thousand charming reviews, and have been inundated with the loveliest letters and invitations. . . . With my earnings I am embellishing his mausoleum, and am putting up in honour of his poem, Kasidah, festoons of camel bells from the desert, in the roof of the tent where he lies, so that when I open or shut the door, or at the elevation of the Mass, the 'tinkling of the camel bell' will sound just as it does in the desert.
The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived, and it holds forth the writer's own view. He maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided, and distributed in this world.
Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has issued it in beautiful and chaste form, for the edification of his clientele of searchers for the literature that is always almost, but never quite completely forgotten.
Regarded, however, as poetry, the book was a failure, and for the simple reason that Burton was not a poet. Like his Kasidah, it contains noble lines, but on every page we are reminded of the translator's defective ear, annoyed by the unnecessary use of obsolete words, and disappointed by his lack of what Poe called "ethericity."
When you want people's minds they are always thinking of something else." Although the critics as a body fell foul of The Kasidah, still there were not wanting appreciators, and its four great lines have often been quoted. Lisa. By this time Mrs. Burton had provided herself with another Chico.
You must have, because you answered me." "We'd better have a good look now. Just wait one minute while I put out the lamp. I'll put away the book I was reading, too." "Right you are!" said the boy, still gruffly. He waited on the terrace while Dion went into the pavilion. As Dion took up "The Kasidah" he glanced down at the page at which Mrs.
We are told also that for many years he could never think of her without pain; and that when, some time after, he narrated the story to his sister he revealed considerable emotion. Miss Stisted thought she could see references to this episode in Burton's poem The Kasidah, portions of which were written some three years later: "Mine eyes, my brain, my heart are sad sad is the very core of me."
The story is strangely paralleled by that of the writing of The Kasidah; or in other words it recalls traits that were eminently characteristic of Burton. As early as 1854, as we have seen, Burton and Steinhauser had planned a translation of The Arabian Nights, Steinhauser was to furnish the prose, Burton the poetry. They corresponded on the subject, but made only trifling progress.
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